Youthful Gauchos Play Stanford in First Round of Southern California Tournament

The Schedule
Sat.-Sun., Sept. 17-18, 2005
at Southern California Water Polo Tournament
Hosted by UC Irvine
at UCI and Corona del Mar High School

UCSB Plays Stanford In First Round
UC Santa Barbara will play Stanford at 10:20 a.m. at UC Irvine's pool in the first round of the Southern California Water Polo Tournament. The 16th-ranked Gauchos will be taking on the fourth-ranked Cardinal for the first time under new head coach Wolf Wigo. Wigo was a three-time All-American at Stanford in the mid-90s. In addition to UCSB and Stanford, Group D includes Pepperdine and Navy.

The Gaucho Record
UCSB enters the annual SoCal Tournament with a 5-3 record. The Gauchos went 4-1 in last weekend's Inland Empire Classic, recording wins over Whittier, Cal Baptist, Pomona-Pitzer and La Verne, and suffering a lose to the University of Redlands.

Wolf CallsWolf Wigo is in his first year as at UCSB and his first year as a collegiate head coach. Wigo, not-so-ironically, has a 5-3 career mark as a coach. Although he is in his first year at UCSB, Wigo had a distinguished playing career at Stanford and with the United States National Team. He helped to lead the Cardinal to consecutive NCAA Championships in 1993 and 1994, and following the 1994 season he was named NCAA Player of the Year. A three-time All-American, Wigo was a member of the U.S. National Team for 11-years. He competed in three Olympic Games, 1996, 2000 and 2004. In 2000, at the Olympics in Sydney, he scored a team-leading 16 goals and was subsequently named to the five-player All-World First Team, making him a finalist for the World Water Polo Player of the Year honors. He was the team captain at the Athens Games in 2004. Wigo was also selected USA Water Polo's Male Athlete of the Year in 1999, 2000 and 2003.

Brother Act Leads UCSB
Eight matches into the 2005 season, the Gauchos are being paced by a brother act. Sophomore driver Coulson Lantz (Carlsbad, Calif./Carlsbad HS) leads the team in scoring with 15 goals and his brother Chris, a freshman driver, is fouirth on the team with eight goals. Combined, the Lantz duo has netted 23 of the team's 78 goals through eight matches, nearly 30-percent.

The Kids Are Alright
Of UCSB's nine leading scorers through eight matches, eight are either freshmen or sophomores and just one is a senior. Coulson Lantz, the leading scorer with 15 goals, is a sophomore, but the team's second-leading scorer Mark Knudtsen (Los Altos, Calif./Bellarmine Prep) is a freshman. Knudtsen has 11 goals. Sophomore Robbie Bauer (Newbury Park, Calif./Newbury Park HS) has 10 goals. Freshman Chris Lantz has eight goals, sophomore Alex Young (Mission Viejo, Calif./Capistrano Valley HS) has six and freshman Dane Lindstrom (Lake Forest, Calif./El Toro HS) has five. Bret DeMuth, the only senior among the top nine scorers, has four tallies. In all, UCSB has scored 78 goals this season, an average of 9.75 per match, and 69 have been scored by freshmen and sophomores, 88.5%.